Arthur Purves, president of the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance, has pinpointed a key player in the transportation debate — the teachers union — that I, for one, have not appreciated, relying as I do upon Mainstream Media reporting for insight into the political dynamics of the General Assembly.
Why, Purves asks, does the state Senate (and, it could be added, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine) insist that transportation improvements not be paid for with General Fund revenues? Why the insistence that transportation not compete with other needs like education and health care? Because of the Virginia Education Association. Writes Purves in testimony before the Fairfax County Delegation to the Virginia General Assembly, January 6, 2007:
Most General Fund revenue comes from income and most of the sales tax as well as lottery and ABC profits. Traditionally fifty percent of General Fund revenues goes to education. … Historically, General Fund revenues, which increase with income, have increased much faster than transportation revenues, which are largely based on gasoline taxes that do not increase with gasoline prices.
The result is a structural imbalance in which public schools dominate the fast-growing income and sales tax revenues while transportation is stuck with stagnant gasoline tax revenues. So while funding for new transportation construction is drying up, inflation-adjusted public-school spending in Virginia has been increasing ten times faster than enrollment.
The General Assembly’s debates on transportation are a turf war in which the Virginia Education Association and its allies in the Senate try to keep transportation out of the General Fund. They do not want funding for state-mandated elementary school guidance counselors to have to compete with widening and repairing interstate highways.
This analysis makes sense to me, although I would offer one note of caution: Purves offers no hard evidence in his letter — perhaps taking the truth of it for granted — that the VEA has lobbied actively to protect the General Fund from transportation funding. I can’t tell if he’s arguing from a logical deduction or from concrete knowledge.
School funding should have to compete with transportation funding, Purves argues. “Higher taxes would only reward mismanagement.”
Update: Purves cites the legislative reports on the VEA website as proof of its opposition to the GOP transportation plan. Says the VEA:
In 2004 we gained $700 million a year with the tax restructuring. The public supported the 2004 tax restructuring because they thought the money would go for education. Now we see these funds diverted to transportation when we are not adequately paying our teachers and not funding the SOQ in keeping with the recommendations of the Board of Education.
